Punk Hazard. A barren valley of jagged rock, more than a dozen kilometers from the central research facility.
Ace and Sabo had wordlessly agreed on this desolate patch of nowhere for their sparring match. Far enough to keep Vegapunk's lab out of the blast radius.
A light breeze kicked up a few curls of dust.
Sabo planted the Flame Dragon Staff against the ground, blue eyes burning with anticipation. "Come on, Ace. It's been a while since we've gone at it."
Ace didn't answer right away. His gaze dropped to the staff in Sabo's hands, already shimmering with that faint pink luster.
"New weapon's not even warm yet and you're already itching to test it out?" A grin tugged at the corner of Ace's mouth. "Fine. I'm curious too. Let's see what that pink dragon fruit can really do in your hands. I'll keep the Yami Yami no Mi out of it this time."
He shrugged off his dark red coat and tossed it onto a high rock ledge, leaving his upper body bare.
The Supreme Grade blade Ace hung quietly in its sheath at his hip. He didn't touch it.
"Come on, Sabo." Ace extended his right hand and curled his fingers inward. "Don't hold back. Let me see if that pink dragon deserves the name you carry."
Sabo stared at Ace standing there empty-handed. He gripped the Flame Dragon Staff with both hands. The pink scale patterns along the shaft pulsed faintly, as if sensing its master's battle intent.
"Ace, after more than half a year of training and fighting, plus this living Mythical Zoan weapon, I'm not the same man who first set sail."
A serious light flared in Sabo's blue eyes. He brought the staff across his chest.
"No Yami Yami no Mi. No Conqueror's Haki coating you just learned. You're planning to fight me with nothing but taijutsu and Divine Flame?"
His voice stayed low, but every word carried a sharp edge of defiance.
"You underestimating me?"
Ace let the question hang for two full seconds.
Then he smiled.
"You know my fists hit every bit as hard as any blade."
He rolled his wrists. Bone popped in a sharp crackle. Ryuo Haki flowed slowly over his knuckles, sheathing them in a layer of seeming indestructibility.
"Since you're that confident, show me how many moves you can last against these fists."
"That's exactly what I wanted to hear."
Sabo grinned and tightened his grip.
"Flame Explosion: Fire Dragon King!"
BOOM.
The compressed flames at his boot heels detonated. Sabo became a blue lightning bolt, shattering the sound barrier in a single breath. The rock beneath his launch point fractured into a spiderweb of cracks.
Mid-flight, the Flame Dragon Staff shifted into hybrid form. The front end warped into a roaring pink dragon head, and plasma-blue flames compressed to their absolute limit by the staff's micro-air channels gathered inside that gaping maw. Like a frenzied sea dragon breaking surface, it came crashing down toward Ace's chest.
Ace did not retreat.
"Good speed."
His voice reached Sabo's ear as calmly as a comment on the weather.
A low hum.
In the split second before the pink dragon's jaws snapped shut, Ace's Observation Haki locked the attack trajectory with perfect clarity. The world slowed inside his mind: the micro-adjustments in Sabo's wrist, the rotation angle of the staff, the exact timing of those closing fangs.
Future Sight.
He threw a straight punch. Simple. Brutal.
CLANG.
Ace's Ryuo-clad fist slammed dead center into the pink dragon's forehead.
The two forces collided in midair. The shockwave ripped up the rock floor for dozens of meters in every direction. Stone shards rained down. Buggy clutched his head and scrambled for cover. Shark, expressionless, shattered a boulder flying toward him with a single palm strike.
"Gh!"
Sabo felt both hands go numb. A terrifying shock rippled up the staff and through his entire body. His prized high-pressure blue flames had been punched apart by sheer, undiluted violence.
Worse, the pink dragon head let out a pained cry. The force of that single punch knocked it recoiling backward.
"It blocked that?" Urouge pressed his palms together, squinting at the battlefield. "The captain's Ryuo straight punch would've turned a standard Pacifista into scrap. That staff just grunted and looks basically fine."
"And Sabo wasn't the one blocking for it." Kuma's voice was low and steady. "The staff was absorbing the impact for him. That's the real value of a living weapon. It doesn't just take hits like dead metal. It mitigates damage. Look at those pink scales."
Everyone focused.
The pink dragon scales across the staff's surface were writhing, just barely. Like living muscle breathing, slowly expelling the residual shockwave out of the weapon's body.
"Those scales…" Leonora's cat pupils narrowed. "The damaged sections healed in seconds."
"Not surprising." Jeno's voice carried a note of pride. "Zoan fruits have extreme recovery. Mythical Zoans are the top tier of that. Add in the fact that the staff itself is forged from regenerative alloy, and you're stacking fruit ability on top of metal properties. Of course the recovery speed is insane."
"Now I get it." Leonora nodded slowly. "That's why even the captain's Ryuo punch couldn't crack it."
Shark's predatory eyes held a flicker of gravity. "And it has its own consciousness. Attack and defense integrated, with self-repair on top. That's not a weapon anymore. That's a symbiote."
On the battlefield, Sabo flipped nimbly in midair and shed the recoil.
"Not done yet!"
He flicked his wrist.
"Pink! Extend!"
A roar.
The Flame Dragon Staff stretched like a living thing, infinitely. The pink dragon head carved a strange arc through the air, bypassing Ace's frontal guard entirely and biting down from the blind spot behind him.
That wasn't all. Two razor claws sprouted from the staff's midsection, clamping tight around Sabo's arm. The senses of man and dragon seemed to fuse. Sabo could feel the airflow around the dragon head, the temperature shifts, even the rhythm of Ace's breathing, as if those sensations were his own.
This was the weapon's true horror. Not a tool. An extension of the senses.
"Dragon's Claw: Dragon's Breath!"
Sabo's body shifted trajectory mid-flight. Flames kicked from his soles a second time as he launched a pincer strike from the flank.
"Front and back at once?" Enel sat cross-legged atop his distant drum, a rare trace of seriousness flickering through his golden eyes. "Yahahaha… Sabo actually forced Ace to handle two directions at the same time. That pink stick of his is starting to look like something out of legend."
"This isn't a normal pincer attack." Leonora's Observation Haki mapped every death-line in full clarity. She could see it clearly: the invisible thread of life connecting Sabo and the staff. "Sabo's consciousness and that weapon's consciousness are synchronizing. He's not commanding it. They're fighting together. Like a two-man combination strike."
"So Sabo's basically going two-on-one?" Buggy's eyes bulged. "That's such a cheap move!"
"Cheap?" Carina shot him a flat look. "Nobody cares about fair in a death match. Sabo's fighting smart. He knows his taijutsu can't beat Ace head-on, so he's using the weapon's independent consciousness to create a two-on-one scenario. That's not cheap. That's tactics."
Buggy opened his mouth. Nothing came out.
Facing the pincer attack, Ace still didn't touch the Yami Yami no Mi.
"Interesting." A smile tugged at his lips. "Letting your weapon fight on its own while your body hits from the other side."
He closed his eyes.
The Voice of All Things and Future Sight activated together.
Top-tier Observation Haki flooded his mind with every detail: Sabo's micro-movements, the contraction frequency of his muscles, the subtle shifts in his breathing rhythm, each precise action of the pink dragon.
Sabo's body would cut in from the left in 0.3 seconds. Attack angle: a rising dragon claw strike.
The pink dragon's jaws would clamp down from behind in 0.5 seconds. Target: the back of the neck.
A 0.2-second gap between the two attacks.
All of it poured into Ace's mind at once, a chessboard laid open with every piece's next move visible.
Whoosh.
Ace vanished.
"What!"
Sabo's Observation Haki screamed warnings, but his dragon claw strike and the pink dragon's bite both hit empty air. Ace had slipped through that lethal crossfire like he'd known every attack trajectory before it happened.
Not faster. Earlier.
"On your left!"
Sabo whipped his head around. The Flame Dragon Staff swung on pure instinct. Pink scales along the shaft flooded black with Ryuo Haki. The dragon's slit pupils flared with that same dark light.
"Too slow."
CRACK.
Ace's Ryuo-coated knife hand struck the staff's shaft with surgical precision, snapping Sabo's swing rhythm in half.
Then Ace's left leg came up. A devastating roundhouse kick tore through the air with a sonic boom and slammed into Sabo's midsection.
THUD.
A wet, hollow impact.
Sabo folded around the kick like a shrimp. Blood sprayed from his mouth. His body rocketed backward like a cannonball and smashed into a towering cliff face, blowing a massive crater into the solid rock.
BOOM.
Stone chunks rained down. Dust billowed everywhere.
"Sabo!" Chopper cried out in alarm.
"Don't worry, Chopper. The captain pulled that." Kuma stood still at the edge of the field. "If this were a real fight, that kick would have snapped his spine."
"Also." Shark added, "Look at the staff."
Through the dust, the Flame Dragon Staff lay braced across Sabo's body. The pink scales glowed softly. In the instant Ace's kick connected with Sabo's abdomen, the staff had bent its own body, using itself to shed at least forty percent of the impact for its master.
Without that buffer, Sabo would have coughed up a lot more than just that mouthful of blood.
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